Optimizely cuts costs 31% while running 200+ campaigns with Optimizely One

Optimizely's marketing team had a problem familiar to plenty of marketing organizations. Teams and channels worked in silos, decisions often came down to the Highest Paid Person's Opinion, and there was no shared system to tie it all together. Work was assigned in Asana, a generic project management tool, but the actual creation and execution happened everywhere else. PDFs, spreadsheets, and slide decks flew back and forth over Teams and email, and nobody could be sure they had the latest version. Worse, the whole setup sat apart from the rest of the team's Optimizely tools, so efficiency was always an afterthought. The team needed something built for marketers, not borrowed from project management.

While work could be assigned within Asana, all of the content creation and execution had to happen in external tools. It was commonplace for disparate PDFs, spreadsheets and PowerPoints to be flying back and forth via Teams and email, making it difficult to keep track of the latest version of assets. It was also a siloed system that was disconnected from the rest of their Optimizely One tools, and therefore, pushed efficiency to the back burner. 

Optimizely recognized that these are common challenges for marketing organizations, and at the end of 2020, acquired Welcome, an industry-leading content marketing platform, which served as the catalyst for their complete marketing transformation and has become the connecting thread across Optimizely One. 

he turning point came at the end of 2020, when Optimizely acquired Welcome, a leading content marketing platform. It became Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform (CMP), and the thread that now runs through every Optimizely One product. With it, the marketing team stopped being a request-based function with little view of what was coming next, and became an agile team that could see the plan, stay aligned on priorities, and make its own decisions. Today that work runs on four pillars: brand, Big Bet, integrated campaigns, and content and activities, with every part of the lifecycle aligned inside Optimizely One. As CMO Shafqat Islam puts it, "The beauty of Optimizely One is that it makes all of this easy on our marketing practitioners, through a single, seamless workflow."

The change started with the basics: intake, planning, creation, and asset storage. CMP gave everyone a shared view of upcoming work through campaign calendars, and shared workspaces that pull a campaign's briefs, activities, content, and analytics into one place. Content creation moved into Tasks, where briefs and assets live inside a structured workflow that keeps the whole team in sync. "We now have a standardized process for how we create campaigns and the tasks that ladder up to them," says Michiel Dorjee, Optimizely's director of digital experience. "With Asana, our marketing strategy was request-based, someone would fill out a form with a specific ask, and then we'd go off and execute in silos. With CMP, we can actually collaborate on a piece of content (that ladders up to an integrated campaign, which ladders up to a 'Big Bet') by bringing people into Tasks." Embedded AI for text and image generation speeds the work along, and finished assets land in Library, CMP's built-in DAM, where AI tagging and automatic cropping take the manual grind out of finding the latest brand-approved file.

From there, content has to ship. The CMS12 and CMP publishing integration lets marketers plan, create, and push straight to the CMS without leaving CMP, so technical marketers are no longer the bottleneck for getting content live. CMS12, Optimizely's PaaS CMS, remains the backbone of Optimizely.com, but when the team built its new Brand Portal it wanted something more modern and flexible, so it turned to SaaS Core, the SaaS version of Optimizely CMS. Decoupling the front end gave it a modular framework it could adapt quickly. "Agility is key for us," says Islam. "We need to be able to have the flexibility that allows our team to make quick adjustments without compromising the quality of the digital experience. Introducing SaaS Core has allowed us to do that."

The payoff shows up across the board. By working from one connected system, Optimizely's marketing team ran more than 200 campaigns across four Big Bets and six integrated campaigns while spending 31% less than the year before. Cost per MQL dropped by half, more than 50 experiments run at once, and experimentation has contributed to 25% growth in revenue from multi-product customers. For Digital Marketing Director Julia Maguire, the difference is simple: "Because we've streamlined our processes and are able to see what everyone is working on, we can find areas for collaboration sooner. This has helped us to reduce duplicated efforts and work smarter, not harder."